Le Château de Saint-Ouen

High society’s keen interest in mechanical curiosities prompted clockmakers and painters to create ‘moving pictures’ showing figures and animals in bucolic landscapes in the style of the period. In the foreground, boatmen, fishermen and washerwomen are going about their business. In the background, the Château de Saint-Ouen and its park, residence of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, from 1759 to 1764. Between the two planes, cows, sheep and horses make farmyard sounds, produced by a small bellows powered by the mechanism behind the picture, bearing the marquise’s coat-of-arms. Sold for 200 livres after Madame de Pompadour’s death, this picture became the property of Princess Kinski before revolutionaries confiscated it in 1794. It was probably in the collection of the former Académie des Sciences before it was allocated to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in 1807.